May 9, 2016 AT 2:00 pm

The cute robots that fix nuclear reactors #robotics

Unsurprisingly, humans and nuclear reactors don’t mix well. So what do you do when you have to maintain the inside of an experimental fusion reactor? Deploy Wall-E’s more competent cousin, of course.

Tom Scott took a look at the maintenance machines that do the repairs inside the UK’s nuclear fusion research reactor. They’re not autonomous robots, but rather remotely controlled arms with a truly scary level of precision, similar to the surgical robots already in use.